Theater shooter John R. Houser, days before his deadly rampage, emotionally described to a local woman how he tried to “euthanize” a beloved pet by striking it on the head with a steel bar.

Bonnie Barbier, 31, of Duson, was at Artmosphere in Lafayette with her friend July 18 enjoying a meal and a few drinks. A man seated alone at a nearby booth drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer approached the women around 5:30 p.m. to pet Barbier’s two dachshund dogs.

“Then he started talking about how he thought people spent way too much money on their pets, on their medical bills,” she said.

“You could tell how he was talking it hurt him,” Barbier said. “In some strange, twisted way he thought he was doing the right thing. It seemed like he was doing it out of love or compassion.”

Houser continued talking about the need for an inexpensive pill to put a pet to sleep so an owner could “finish it off with an ax,” she said. “And there I was with my two dogs, my babies.”

By then, Barbier recognized not all was right with the well-groomed man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts who had pulled up a chair at their table uninvited.

“He kept talking and talking and talking,” she recalled.

Houser said he was a lawyer but wasn’t practicing law. He said he tried to write letters to the editor to newspapers about political topics but they wouldn’t be published unless he “dumbed them down,” she said.

He looked normal, but the words he used and the thoughts he expressed didn’t jibe with his appearance, Barbier said.

Houser mostly talked about money, about how Americans spend so much money on things they shouldn’t, she said.

Barbier started to tune him out and think of a way to ease herself away from him without upsetting him.

“I knew I had to be gentle and not just say leave me alone, you’re scaring us,” she said.

Barbier texted her niece, asking her to call her cell phone and pretend there was an emergency. When her niece didn’t reply, Barbier made the excuse that they had to be somewhere at 7 and needed to shower and change.

“He said, ‘That’s OK. I understand’ and he got up and walked out of Artmosphere,” she said.

The day after the shooting, when she saw his photograph, Barbier said he looked familiar. When she heard the description of his vehicle, an older blue car, it clicked.

“My stomach dropped. I think I even started to cry,” she said. “I couldn't believe the person who did this unspeakable act was standing next to me. He touched my dogs.”

Barbier said she was in shock about her close encounter with the killer and wonders ‘what if?

“What if it had happened here?” she said. “Was there anything I could have said? But I know there 's nothing I could have done.”

Five hundred miles away in Houser’s hometown of Columbus, Georgia, some former neighbors say his life was a decades-long collision course with disaster.

“He’s been known as a lunatic and a fool around this neck of the woods for years,” said Patrick Williams, an antiques dealer who once filed a police report alleging Houser sold him a stolen iron fence at a flea market. “He was a highly intelligent guy but mean as a snake and dangerous. I wasn’t a bit surprised when I saw his picture on TV. And no one else that knew him was surprised either.”

Houser, who went by Rusty, was known as odd and eccentric in the cluster of towns near the state line between Georgia and Alabama where he lived nearly all his life.

Neighbors said he filled his in-ground pool with hundreds of koi. He flew a Confederate flag, passed doomsday fliers around his neighborhood, pounded out angry online missives about corruption and injustice and spouted admiration for Adolf Hitler.

He fit the familiar mold of mass shooters, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, author and prominent expert on massacres. Houser was paranoid, blamed everyone but himself, alienated his family and survived in a world of self-imposed isolation.

“If you gave me a list of names, I would have picked his out as the one that done it,” said Vince Woodward, who was then active in local Republican politics.

But many towns have a resident crackpot. And hindsight is an inaccurate lens, Fox said.

“There’s a very large haystack of people who have these characteristics, but very few needles that will indeed carry out a rampage,” he said. “They’re not red flags. They’re yellow. The only time they turn red is after blood is spilled on them.”

Mass shooters often sound a lot like Houser, he said. But thousands of men who sound a lot like Houser don’t become mass shooters. Fox compared the relationship to another sort of tragedy: most planes that crash do so in bad weather. But most planes withstand storms without plunging from the sky.